Wednesday, May 22, 2013

The importance of "measure twice, cut once"

Although others may tell you something over and over again, you don't really learn a lesson until you experience it yourself. Here is an example of when I learned the importance of measuring twice, and cutting once. Although this case didn't actually involve cutting, it did involve purchasing a CPU cooler for a very toasty HTPC I was building. The chip was a 3.2 GHz Hyperthreaded Pentium 4 (Socket 775) and it ran incredibly hot (82W max TDW). I wanted a quiet box since it was being used in a HTPC environment, so I purchased a Cooler Master Hyper-212+ CPU cooler. The pictures don't do it justice. This cooler was simply massive. In fact, I can't in good-faith recommend you use this cooler with a vertical motherboard orientation (despite CM saying this is OK) due to motherboard warpage (shhh..."warpage" is a word, don't question it).

CM Hyper-212+ with two fans mounted. Both fans had rubber isolating hardware

Mounted on the motherboard

Despite looking up the height requirements before purchasing, I didn't account for the addition of the mounting bracket on the bottom of the cooler, along with the tolerances of the motherboard mounting pegs. It was an excellent cooler with great performance, but it just didn't fit!

So close! But not close enough.

So to make a short story shorter, I learned my lesson. I sold the cooler to a friend and now always (sometimes) measure twice! =)